A Brief History

A Brief History of the
Devil's Triangle

Limbo of the Lost. The Twilight Zone. Hoodoo Sea. The Devil's Triangle.
The vast three-sided segment of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by Bermuda,
Puerto Rico and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, did not receive its most
famous nickname until 1964, but reports of bizarre happenings there,
or nearby, have been recorded for centuries. In fact, many claim
that Christopher Columbus bore witness to the Bermuda Triangle's
weirdness.

As the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria sailed through the area
in 1492, it is reported that Columbus's compass went haywire and
that he and his crew saw weird lights in the sky, but these events
have mundane explanations. From the account in Columbus's journal,
it is thought that his compass's slight inaccuracy stemmed from
nothing more than the discrepancy between true north and magnetic
north. As for the lights, Columbus wrote of seeing "a great
flame of fire" that crashed into the ocean -- probably a meteor.
He saw lights in the sky again on October 11, which, of course,
was the day before his famous landing. The lights, brief flashes
near the horizon, were spotted in the area where dry land turned
out to be.

Another historical event retroactively attributed to the Bermuda
Triangle is the discovery of the Mary Celeste. The vessel was found
abandoned on the high seas in 1892, about 400 miles off its intended
course from New York to Genoa. There was no sign of its crew of
ten or what had happened to them. Since the lifeboat was also missing,
it is quite possible that they abandoned the Mary Celeste during
a storm that they wrongly guessed the ship could not weather. But
what makes it even harder to call this a Bermuda Triangle mystery
is that it the ship was nowhere near the Triangle -- it was found
off the coast of Portugal.

The Bermuda Triangle legend really began in earnest on December
5, 1945, with the famed disappearance of Flight 19. Five Navy Avenger
bombers mysteriously vanished while on a routine training mission,
as did a rescue plane sent to search for them -- six aircraft and
27 men, gone without a trace. Or so the story goes.

When all the facts are laid out, the tale of Flight 19 becomes
far less puzzling. All of the crewmen of the five Avengers were
inexperienced trainees, with the exception of their patrol leader,
Lt. Charles Taylor. Taylor was perhaps not at the height of his
abilities that day, as some reports indicate that he had a hangover
and failed in his attempts to pass off this flight duty to someone
else.

With the four rookie pilots entirely dependent on his guidance,
Taylor found that his compass malfunctioned soon into the flight.
Taylor chose to continue the run on dead reckoning, navigating by
sighting landmarks below. Being familiar with the islands of the
Florida Keys where he lived, Taylor had reason to feel confident
in flying by sight. But visibility became poor due to a brewing
storm, and he quickly became disoriented.

Flight 19 was still in radio contact with the Fort Lauderdale air
base, although the weather and a bad receiver in one of the Avengers
made communication very spotty. They may have been guided safely
home if Taylor had switched to an emergency frequency with less
radio traffic, but he refused for fear they would be unable to reestablish
contact under these conditions.

Taylor ended up thinking they were over the Gulf of Mexico, and
ordered the patrol east in search of land. But in reality, they
had been heading up the Atlantic coastline, and Taylor was mistakenly
leading his hapless trainees much further out to sea. Radio recordings
indicate that some of them suggested to Taylor that Florida was
actually to the west.

A search party was dispatched, which included the Martin Mariner
that many claim disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle along with
Flight 19. While it is true that it never returned, the Mariner
did not vanish; it blew up 23 seconds after takeoff, in an explosion
that was witnessed by several at the base. This was unfortunately
not an uncommon occurrence, because Mariners were known for their
faulty gas tanks.

No known wreckage from Flight 19 has ever been recovered. One reasonable
explanation is that Taylor led the planes so far into the Atlantic
that they were past the continental shelf. There the ocean abruptly
drops from a few hundred feet deep to several thousand feet deep.
Planes and ships that sink to such depths are seldom seen again.
The deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, the 30,100-foot-deep Puerto
Rico Trench, lies within the Bermuda Triangle.

Combining the circumstances of the failing compass, the difficulty
of radio transmissions, and the absence of wreckage, tales of mysterious
intervention befalling Flight 19 began to take form. Theories involving
strange magnetic fields, time warps, Atlantis, and alien abduction
began to appear. Even an official Navy report intimated that the
Avengers had disappeared "as if they had flown to Mars."

About 200 prior and subsequent incidents have been attributed to
the inherent strangeness of the area, which was forever christened
the Bermuda Triangle by writer V. Gaddis in a 1964 issue of Argosy,
a fiction magazine. Public interest in the "phenomenon"
was whipped into a frenzy by Charles Berlitz's 1974 bestseller The
Bermuda Triangle, a sensationalized and thoroughly inaccurate account
that shunned the facts in favor of mysterious excitement.

There are two major obstacles to taking the Bermuda Triangle legend
seriously. The first is that most of the associated mishaps can
be explained by rational means. The second is that most of the associated
mishaps did not occur within the Bermuda Triangle. If you plot all
of the alleged instances of the area's malevolent influence on a
map, you find that only a handful have actually happened within
the Triangle's borders. Sea disasters as distant as Portugal, Ireland
and the Pacific and Indian Oceans have been blamed on the Bermuda
Triangle. We might then just as well rename it as "The Worldwide
Curse of All Seas." Some have turned this fact on its head
by proposing this as evidence that the Devil's Triangle is expanding
in scope.

Others may respond that it is evidence that accidents will happen
-- no matter where exactly on the land, on the sea or in the air
they take place.